(International Library of Sociology) Celia Lury - Brands_ The Logos of the Global Economy-Routledge (2004)

interfaces, they constitute’ (1994:187). The suggestion here—developed
in Chapter 3—will be that the brand organises the activities of the
market as if it were an interface; and in doing so, the brand presents the
‘faces of a dice of sensation’ (ibid.: 187).
Let me elaborate a little here. The interface—like the static frame of the
window or mirror—is a surface or boundary that connects and separates
two spaces: an inner and outer environment. So, as an interface, the
brand is a frame that organises the two-way exchange of information
between the inner and outer environments of the market in time,
informing how consumers relate to producers and how producers relate
to consumers. The exchange is a matter not merely of qualitative
calculation, but also of affect, intensivity and the re-introduction of
qualities. However, although these exchanges are intensive, dynamic
and two-way, they are not direct, symmetrical or reversible. The
interface of the brand connects the producer and consumer and
removes or separates them from each other; it ‘is revealing of some
relationships, but it keeps others very well hidden’ (Pavitt, 2000b:175).
Or to put this another way, the brand as interface is a site—or
diagram—of interactivity, not of interaction.
From this point of view, the brand may be seen as both promoting and
inhibiting ‘exchange’ between producers and consumers, and informs
this asymmetrical exchange through a range of performances of its own.
The range of performances is not entirely predetermined by the
objectivity of the brand, however, but emerges in interactivity. In other
words, just as the subject may be seen as an effect of performativity
(Butler, 1990), so too may the ongoing object-ivity of the brand. The
brand has its own (recursive) logic or
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performativity through which is organised a two-way, dynamic,
selective and asymmetrical communication of information between
producers and consumers. In Lee and LiPuma’s terms, the brand is an
instance of ‘a self-reflexive structure of circulation built around some
reciprocal social action’ (2002:193); or, alternatively, an example of a
‘self-reflexive objectification’ of ‘temporal agency’ (ibid.: 193).
The performativity of the brand
Central to the performativity of the brand as an interface are certain
practices in marketing that function in an analogous way to
programming techniques in both broadcasting and computing. The most
significant example of these techniques is the loop, a central control
structure of many new media objects. This is, then, a third respect in
which it may be helpful to consider the brand as a new media object. As